Interactive Resources for Teaching Stats

The internet has allowed the creation and dissemination of a wide range of tools useful to those of us who teach statistics in our research methods courses. I found two to be particularly helpful.

Guessthecorrelation.com – As its name implies, the site gives students a scatterplot of points and asks them to guess the correlation. My students were asked to play three games and upload screenshots of their final scores as evidence that they had completed the assignment. Many went on to play more than three games; the sound effects and points make it a very addictive game. What it brought home to them very effectively is that correlation is about how tight the points are to the (imaginary) best-fit line, not about the slope of the line. Students enjoyed playing a game as homework; it was certainly less onerous than practicing calculating correlations by hand.

The Rice Virtual Lab in Statistics: Sampling Distributions – The Java-based simulation for sampling distributions allows you to draw a distribution of any shape you want, select repeated samples of any size, and then plot the sampling distribution of the means (or several other statistics). I even let them draw some of the distributions and do some of the simulations so that they were convinced it wasn’t just the values I was picking. I was able to demonstrate to the class in just a few minutes that the shape of the parent distribution doesn’t matter; the means will always be distributed normally. Watching their faces, this really blew their minds; they probably would have blindly accepted it if I just told them this is how it is, but having seen it, we had a much easier time accepting that the same property held for regression coefficients. (The chance to visit the central limit theorem was a bonus for undergrads.) The whole activity took less time than a lecture of the similar material. (A similar lab simulation exists for confidence intervals as well.)

What about you? What are your favorite interactive sites for teaching research methods or statistics?